Monday, June 09, 2008

Achieving a sustainable madness...

I'd like to call for a new round of experiments in creative madness. The kind that got started in the 1960s... Hold it right there Rainbow... Put the god's eye down Moonbeam. This time it doesn't have to include every frizzy-haired freak jumping on the bandwagon, just a few visionaries who can restrain themselves from over indulgence and really focus on refolding the old envelope into new origami shapes.

“The only performance that makes it, that really makes it, that makes it all the way, is the one that achieves madness.” says Mick Jagger in Performance.

There's truthiness in that statement. I mean a large part of all that madness in the 60s was just people saying: hey, life is precious, why are we wasting it on corporate servitude and fearfulness? Let's unglue this system and see what this species (i.e. humanity) can really do. The madness was a way of shaking off the shackles of mundane, repetitious conventionality. Unfortunately, drugs entered the picture, and in my opinion that's where it all went down the shitter. I think drugs clouded the issue of exploration and gave plenty of really adventurous souls permission to act like idiots and over indulge their "trips" into so-called alternative living. They got lost in the non-plot - albeit somewhat ecstatically - much the way the film Performance does. Also important to note how some pop experiments went awry in places like Altamont where the raw stench of humanity was simply too powerful to channel in any meaningful direction. Sympathy for the Devil may have been a good track for igniting imaginations over headphones, but not such a great choice for the powderkeg atmosphere of a live venue.

Today we are living in remarkably creative (and yet somehow constrictive) times. The Internet has unleashed enormous waves of innovation and personal expression, it's just that there's really not much of a way for the cream to rise to the top. Creative chaos is the flavor of the day - in some ways it's a very Utopian state for a society to achieve, however, it necessarily implodes under the magnificent weight of its unsupported output. What is the infrastructure of a dream, man?